1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information searching techniques, and more specifically to searching for information relevant to a given query and further related to given contextual information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online forums, such as Yahoo!® Answers, Yahoo!® Groups, and Yahoo!® Messages, provide information that is categorized by topic. These online forums may allow users to ask questions or perform other queries on the information in the forum, or on topics covered in the forum. In these forums, information, such as web pages, relevant to the queries may also be generated by searching documents in a hyperlinked environment. The documents being searched may be, for example, web pages accessible on the Internet via the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is an example of a hyperlinked environment. A question or a query posed by a user may form the search terms. In one example, the search is carried out by a search engine that locates documents accessible by a network (e.g., the Internet) for which the contents of the documents match a search term. The search is typically text based, where a document matches a search term if the document's text contains that search term.
In existing online forums, since answers are located automatically by performing a text search for the question, the search may locate a previously-provided answer to the question, but may also locate information that does not answer the question, which can clutter the results and make the answer difficult to find in the search results. Answers may also be provided by other users, but there is generally a time delay before another user provides an answer. Therefore it would be desirable to be able to focus the search for an answer on information relevant to the question.